One company making a big splash this season on the iPhone is ESPN, the top sports cable network and Web site. The company has recently released several apps for the iPhone, including ESPN ScoreCenter, which keeps track of scores for your favorite teams, an ESPN Fantasy Football app, and an ESPN Radio app, which lets you stream live nationwide and local sports radio programming.

They've been a hit: ScoreCenter has been downloaded more than 2.7 million times since debuting in June, and ESPN's iPhone apps have been downloaded more than 4.5 million times in the last year. (ESPN also maintains an excellent mobile Web site for people using other phones.)

NFL and college football fans hoping to watch live games on the iPhone have some new options this year.

DirecTV is offering an app for its SuperFan service. While the app is free, the service is very expensive: You must be a DirecTV subscriber, pay $300 for NFL Sunday Ticket, and another $100 for the SuperFan service. But if you're doing that already, the iPhone app is a no-brainer add-on. (This app is also available for the Palm Pre and select BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices.)

Meanwhile, Sprint customers -- no iPhone, but Palm Pre and BlackBerry -- can access a Sprint NFL app, which includes live video streaming of the NFL Network, plus live radio streams of NFL games. Sprint tells us that more than 1.5 million subscribers have downloaded it.

And CBS is streaming some live college games -- one football and basketball game per week -- to the iPhone via its new CBS Sports: College app, which costs $9.99.

The best live sports app of them all is still Major League Baseball's At Bat for the iPhone, which keeps getting better as the baseball playoffs approach. This year, the league added live game radio and video feeds to the app, and recently allowed users to purchase live streams for individual games for $0.99 each. The paid At Bat app and the free "Lite" edition are on 1.1 million phones, MLB tells us.

DirecTV SuperFan

DirecTV offers live football video for the iPhone via this new app. Note: The app is free, but the service is very expensive: You must be a DirecTV subscriber, pay $300 for NFL Sunday Ticket, and another $100 for the SuperFan service. But if you're doing that already, the iPhone app is a no-brainer add-on.

This app is also available for the Palm Pre and select BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices.

CBS Sports: College

MLB At Bat

The best live sports app of them all is still Major League Baseball's At Bat for the iPhone, which keeps getting better as the baseball playoffs approach.

This year, the league added live game radio and video feeds to the app, and recently allowed users to purchase live streams for individual games for $0.99 each. The league also offers a BlackBerry app.